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Yes, but from a practical standpoint, morals are unachievable ideals, not behaviors.

Aaaaah.
that's the disconnect.
I was not considering/referring to morals as an objective external ideal in my statements, but rather the patterns of behavior that we, as societies, enforce upon ourselves...
my bad.

Maybe I should have stressed that more in my previous posts.

The last person whose behavior matched his moral code got nailed to a tree by a bunch of Romans.

No.
It's like saying that the motherboard of a computer is directly responsible for the WOW software.
The brain structure allows for thought, and it does impose physical limitations on thought, but it doesn't direct what thoughts occur.

Perhaps i didn't explain myself well.  I'm not saying that the hardware is solely responsible for our behavior, as it is an emergent phenomenon. I was just saying that our behavior is largely responsible for our likeliness to stay alive, at the individual level, and at the social level.  the governing patterns of behavior at the social level being 'morals'.

Yes, but from a practical standpoint, morals are unachievable ideals, not behaviors.

Let me try this again:

I tend to think the ideas of morality and ethics arose in conjunction with the evolution of society, not our brains.  If we were all still living in disparate caves, our nearest neighbors a days journey away, morals and ethics would not be necessary.  They became a necessity once we figured out we are going to be stuck swimming in a vast sea of humanity.  It's the morals and ethics, in part, that allow us to tread that sea and keep us from drowning.  In other words, sometimes you have to be nice to other people in order to make it anywhere in society. 

Yes.

To phrase it another way, evolution can explain why we have rules for dealing with other humans, but it can't tell use what the ideal set of rules are.  

Yes.

Ok, it's not clip art, but...

No.

It's like saying that the motherboard of a computer is directly responsible for the WOW software.

The brain structure allows for thought, and it does impose physical limitations on thought, but it doesn't direct what thoughts occur.

Ok, maybe we're being a bit harsh.

Morals are the result of high-level thought processes (by "high-level" I mean meta thinking, the sort of thinking that separates us from most other primates and mammals).

The fundamental structure in our brain allows high-level thought.

Evolution somehow produced the fundamental structure in our brain.

So, it could be said that morals come from the evolutionary process.  However, saying it like that implies a much more direct link than is actually there.  I mean, you could take that line of thought and say that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a result of evolution; even though you can reason it out, it's essentially a meaningless statement.

Malcoid, did I read right that you're not in High School yet?

 


Someone wake me when Kai gets here.

Our social dynamics are still largely based on primate pack behavior.

A large amount of "morals" seem to run counter to this, creating cognitive dissonence, and guilt (some here call it The Machine™).

Many "morals" seem to be how we wish other people would act, not how they actually act.

This would appear to make "morals" fall into the same set of impossible and imaginary ideals as in Plato's cave.

 (as defined by the agent in question). 

Rat.  Stop.  RWHN was being nice about it.

12) People who go to graduate school on a whim because they have nothing to do with their lives and don't even care about their research or coursework.

Methinks this one only popped up just recently...

In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be.

This just hit me in the face like a flying barstool.






LMNO
-learned something today.

I like this.

Cain, I applaud you for sticking with this after it became apparent that most of us had no idea as to what we were talking about.

So, what's it called when the individual chooses their own moral code?

[edit: it appears to be "appraiser".]


Also, I have to look into subjective universal morals more.

Jack, I'm afraid you're going to have to do what everyone else does.

Mail it to every single publisher you can find, and endure a 99% rejection rate.